Invest in user stories

Meet Timmy. Timmy is a freelance developer with several years of experience. He has previously worked on small to medium size projects and has a good feeling about his ability to execute.

Meet Sarah. Sarah is head of sales at BigCo Consulting. Since she started at the organization as an intern, they have grown leaps and bounds. She now runs a team of ten people but managing communications within them is becoming unwieldy. She has at best, a vague idea of how tasks she is assigning are getting completed and in what time.

Sarah has heard of the good work that Timmy did for her friend. She believes that her organization would benefit a lot from his services. Seems everyone is making it big in tech this days and she wants in on it.

A kickoff meeting is set off between Sarah and Timmy. Sarah explains that she needs a system to manage her workers more effectively. They discuss about potential features on the product and come up with a list that Timmy is to develop.

Secure authentication

Task management

Accessible from anywhere

This feature list seems good and Timmy comes up with a time estimate and tells Sarah what she needs to pay him. A contract is signed and they both leave the table happy.

One month later Timmy is back with the first MVP done. In the MVP the app enables Sarah to assign tasks to her staff but is still unsatisfied with the product. She can’t really pinpoint it but she doesn’t feel that the app will be particularly useful especially because she could have just as well sent out an email to the team member with the same task.

Sarah decommissions the app having only paid the deposit and leaves the table thoroughly dissatisfied. Timmy feels the deposit paid was barely enough to cover the work done and loses a potential referee for his work. What went wrong?

The curse of knowledge

KRS One has a lot to teach us in the software world. Everyone perceives the world from the prism of their personal experiences. Sarah and Timmy come from vastly different worlds. In Sarah’s mind she saw that she had properly communicated her intent, she assumed meaning to her words were built from the same pool as Timmy’s. Timmy assumed the same.

Unfortunately whilst Sarah was thinking of automating her existing process, Timmy was imagining all the bells and whistles he could build on top of her task list program.

Is there a way out of this conundrum?

The bad news is that there isn’t. The good news though is that we can mitigate it.

User stories

A user story is tool used to capture a description of a software feature from the users perspective.

A good user story outlines specific software feature while keeping all the requirement in a consistent format.

They are easy to write, read, evaluate and dare I say fun.

A user story comes in the format:

As a ______
I want to ______
So that ______

User stories come with goodies that would have saved Timmy and his client from the situation they found themselves.

The goodies I speak of are the characteristics that all good user stories share. They have a convenient Acronym

INVEST

Independent

Good user stories are independent. That is they can be developed separately from each other. By putting the requirements in form of user stories. Sarah would have been able to prioritize the user stories that had the most value to her. This action would have informed Timmy on what Sarah’s actual needs were.

Valuable

Each user story comes with a non-codable part, the So that _____ bit. That part of the story gives meaning to the requirement. Sarah would have a good platform on which to elucidate not just what she wanted built but why she wanted it built.

Estimable

Yet we humans can better estimate smaller components than we can larger ones. User stories enable Timmy to get a more realistic view of how the project is and Sarah to understand the effort required to build her application.

Small

User stories should be small enough to fit on an index card. A side effect of this property is that each story can be developed rather rapidly. The quicker the story is developed the faster the feedback loop between Sarah and Timmy can be closed.

Testable

Written in this format, it is fairly easy for Sarah to run the user story through the application to see if it actually meets her expectation (Technically called Acceptance test)

There we go. I am convinced next time, Timmy and Sarah will use user stories to capture their requirements. What about you?